Critique on "Therapy Session: Caroline, 25 years of age"

Sara Angela Rodriguez

A415-002/Chambers

Student Critique/ Therapy Session: Caroline, 25 years of age

3/12/2013

I enjoyed reading your piece. I thought that it was very clever to experiment with the different font styles in order to explore different voiced, but I wish that the voices would be more consistent. From the beginning we learn that the text in bold is the ‘patient’ Caroline (who we later discover is not a patient at all, but a character being thought up) who is being interviewed by the ‘physician’ (or the author) who is represented in regular times new roman font, but who is the voice in italics? At first I assumed that it was Caroline laughing at the questions being posed by the physician, then I thought it was the physician laughing at the naiveté of Caroline, but finally I came to the assumption that it was a thirds separate voice all together because the dialogue in italics did not seem appropriately accredited to either character. The italics ended up being more like stage directions than anything else. I believe that if you were to clarify who is who in this piece it would be better. You can do this by adding the italicized action to the section of text to which it corresponds. If this is not done the confusion between the voices might continue. Another issue that I saw in this piece was the ending, when the physician’s/author’s husband addresses her. this whole section is part of the piece but I feel that it needs to be detached, especially because the text which we have been conditioned to read is gone (no more bold just italics, romans, and a colon to separate speakers). I think that overall the piece was amazing but what it lacks is consistency.